Thursday, September 18, 2008

Notes on A's class

Umbrella example - difference between looking and focusing
Balancing umbrella

Using die mind reading trick

I'm showing you that it's all about focus.
You've got to get the students impressed with their mental capabilities. Dots are called pips.

Make a configuration of four pips. Now put a fifth pip. Raise your hand if put that fifth dot somewhere other than the middle.

quincunx
spell it for them

How many letters?
How many syllables?
Magic fingers, spell it in the air.

If you have three babies, you have _
If you have four babies, you have _
If you have five babies, you have _

quin - means five.
What letter does it start with ?
WHat's next?
How can you make a u into an n?
How many n's were in it? How many u's are in it?

What letters dropped out?

Make students pay attention to the distinctive features of a word.

I'm forcing you to pay attention; i'm not telling you. Tellers belong in banks. You are a teacher. You are activating their minds. Making them do things with it in their heads.

To teach a word by sight, the cardinal principle is this:
Never teach a child to read a word that is not already in the child's head.

What's teh first thing I did with quincunx? I made sure that you knew what it was. Next, I forced you to pay attention to its distinctive features. Use as many of the modalities as possible. Then there needs to be reinforcement.

Can you think of 3 or 4 or 5 things that I did to do that? Write them down.

What letter am I covering up?

What else? I could cut the letters up. Ask repeating letters.

Can you use design on your paper to make an x by connecting dots? And that's the last letter in the word.

The eyes looking is not mental. You need their minds engaged.

Reinforcement can be Word Wall, Puzzle, games (remember games you played as a child - go fish, etc.).

Word recognition
There is no one way. We're all different.

Sight words - What and why -  Fry, Dolch, high-frequency word list. These 300 words make up 65 - 66% of the words you will ever need to read. First 100 words, 1st grade. 2nd hundred, 2nd grade. 3rd hundred, 3rd grade. These basic sight words should be mastered by third grade. No reason for every third grader not to know these words. A word a day is not difficult. But, if you don't have any type of plan, it won't get accomplished. Kids will get out of third grade not knowing these words. Make a plan. Get with the other teachers. Make sure that first grade teachers make sure all kids know these 100 words. 

Can you see all the names on a spreadsheet? Can you see all the words listed off? Can you see making small groups for activity so that you can check off on that spreadsheet?

Put the words on cards. Shuffle the cards. Make it a game. Flip a card. If you know the word, you get the card. If not, it's mine. What's the score? It's simple. It's a game. And when I'm done, I have all of the cards I know I need to work on.

Think about schools. It's reading time, take out your books. And they do lessons, and they're nice lessons, but at the end of the day, are you absolutely sure that your kids have learned?
Make sure that you teach them:
  • They are common. (highlighter, newspaper activity)
  • Many of them are phonetically irregular. (home, raid - rules of phonics. o in come, a in said - phonetically irregular). How many of you have a friend named Jennifer? Do you ever call her Jen? How about Elizabeth? Liz? A long vowel is long because it takes longer to say an a than it takes to say a short vowel. That's why we call them long vowels. Now... we are basically lazy. Over the years we have taken words that have long vowels and we have shortened them. We are lazy. The most frequently used words tend to be irregular because we have shortened them. Write the word TOME. It's a big book. How often do you use the word TOME. Infrequent, so it kept the long sound. How about SOME? We use that all the time, so it's shortened vowel sound.
  • Allows them to make use of context clues.
Can you teach any word by sight? Yes. I taught you.

What? Why? How? Study by that.

Phonics
What is it? phoneme-grapheme correspondence
Phoneme - smallest unit of sound
Grapheme - smallest unit of written text
You are putting a sound to a letter.
Here's the problem: How many letters do we have? 26. It would be easy if we had one to one, but in English, we have 44 sounds. That's why English is hard to learn. 
Kids - learning ABCs. You know the word alphabet. Have you made the connection that the word alphabet is from the Greek letters for a and b.

Why do we teach phonics? 
  1. Our language is phonetic. Some aren't.
  2. It's an independent means for students to learn words.
We have 26 letters, divided into vowels and consonants. What is a vowel? Has to do with the way we make the sound. 
a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, w
Open your mouth. Let's do long a to short a, all the way down to u.
Now let's do it with consonants. Starting with B. Let's go. Did you keep your mouth open? You were supposed to keep it open.

A vowel is a sound produced by an unobstructed flow of air. 

What is a consonant?
Now I want you to write down what a consonant is. You're smart now.
Now what is it?
A consonant is a sound produced by an obstructed flow of air.
What are these obstructions? l sound, tongue and roof of mouth, th = tongue and teeth
Season after Fall = winter. Mouth is closed, w is a consonant.
White stuff that falls during winter up north = snow; mouth is open, it's a vowel.
Yellow, y is a consonant.
By, y is a vowel.

Every syllable must have a vowel sound. Otherwise, nothing would come out of your mouth. The vowels allow the sound to come out.

Spelling test: who can spell rhythm. There are two syllables, two vowel sounds, even though only one vowel.

Remember when you learned how to tell when to add s and when to add es to make something plural.
tax
Plural is taxes, two syllables.
key
Plural is keys, one syllable, no e

Build grapheme tree
Show them GHOTI

Between the lions

Phonogram 

What? a unit of sound made up of an onset and a rime. Also called word families.
Why?
  1. When you learn one, you learn many
  2. It circumvents the need to teach the vowel rules.
  3. It's fun. They are rhymes. The brain is wired to enjoy rhymes.
Game - word family, win - lose - or draw
dice, mice, slice, rice
Yall are much happier now than when we were talking about digraphs and diphthongs. Diphthongs don't do it for you. You like phonograms.

There are rules of phonics but we don't use them. Why do we insist that kids learn them?

ab is a phonogram. If I have ab, I can have slab, stab, blab, grab, tab, nab, crab, dab... when you learn one word, you learn 10-15 other words.

ack gives us back, flack, track, stack, sack, tack... it takes us pretty far, so teach it.

five - hive, live, dive, thrive, strive, arrive, jive
bed - fed, Ted, red, shred, shed, bled, not dead or tread (Don't confuse them by using words that aren't in the word family)

Two weeks from today, word recognition lesson due. Easiest thing: a phonic element. Mini-lesson, small group. You could do the BL blend. You could do a phonogram, like a ake word family. 
First, select the element you are going to teach.
Second, come up with words that contain that element.
Third, from those words, choose one as a theme word. (For instance, you are teaching TR blends, may choose the word TRAIN. That gives you a theme. Can't you see a train going in a tunnel? It makes your lesson more interesting - spices it up.
Fourth, get the words that I want to teach from the students heads. (Remember, never teach them a word they don't already have in their heads.)
Fifth, get the students to determine what they have in common.
Sixth, bring in other BL words. Let them see that they all sound the same.
Seventh, a game or activity to reinforce it. 

Example, big blazer velcro words to it. Or blue blanket, they reach under and feel things under it, maybe a block. Think about universals to get their attention. 

Next week, structural analysis, context clues, get you ready for lesson due in 2 weeks.

Structural analysis

Context clues - look at all the words around it, figuring out what the unknown word is.

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